Category Archives: Tech in our lives

I know it has been a long time coming, but here it is. The wiring video of the WindyNation 200 watt solar panel kit is done and up on YouTube. The process really was pretty straight forward and easy. The hardest part really was waiting on the warm Wisconsin weather. Coming soon will be the really cool windy screens I made for the CamperVan and the second day of our Key West trip (Greenville and our drive there).

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This weekend, we got the solar panels mounted on the van, look for that video soon. Also, replaced a bad cable running from my alternator to my battery bank. Then to top it off I was able to save a about a $180 on van maintenance, using Seafoam. You can look for that video coming soon as well. And of course the deep cycle battery testing continues, things are looking good on that front.

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This evening I started testing the Pulsetech PowerPulse on a new battery. The battery is a deep cycle Marine battery, just purchased from Walmart. The battery had an initial voltage of 12.69, but testing with the hydrometer showed 2 week cells. I placed the Pulsetech PowerPulse on the battery tonight and will let it run 24 hours. Then I recharge and test the voltage it will hold.

The entire idea behind this testing is to see if I can improve a weak battery and then test this on 2 other batteries weaker. This will be done in later testing. Stay tuned for updates on this testing. Then down the road you can expect a video of the entire process on my YouTube channel.

As I watched Christmas, and the corresponding break from school for my daughters, come and go I was reminded of the fun that technology toys can provide. I was gifted the new Google Home device and it’s quite entertaining for my daughters to ask it to make funny sounds, play silly games, set timers, and even ask it for help on their homework. For me it’s a great way to start my day asking it to tell me the news or play music throughout the house.

Today I stated reading “Abundance: The future is better than you think”. It has been on my reading list for awhile. As I read through this book, I will post some of my thoughts and take a ways. As I began reading about the possibilities of a planet where there is an abundance of resources for everyone, it was the mental hurdles we face that struck me. It seems that the same things that hold us back on believing in an abundant society are the same hurdles we face daily when dealing with all kinds of situations.

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts, time saving, energy saving rules of thumb that allow us to simplify the decision making process. In social psychology these show up when we assign probabilities like evaluating the possibility that a suspect is armed. The first thing the brain does is check it’s database for known situations and examples. The ease of access of this information is known as the availability heuristic and leads to increased perception of the probability.

Heuristics are an essential tool in decision making when we have limited information, limited time to respond and limited mental resources available. Although on average this process of decision making can be very effective, there are times when it can lead to severe errors in judgment. There are a number of cognitive biases that can impact our decisions. Among the most powerful is the conformation bias. This is the bias where we unconsciously search out information that tends to confirm or support what we already think or believe. Then there are biases like anchoring, where we tend to focus too much on one piece of information.

These biases and others work in tandem to affect our decisions and thoughts. When combined with our tendencies to be local optimists and global pessimists this can lead to even bigger problems. This means we tend to seriously overestimate our abilities and significantly under estimate the world at large.

We’re on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity — and it’s not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization. “Perception and creativity are very intimately connected,” Agüera y Arcas says. “Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create.”

360 million Myspace accounts and 65 million Tumblr accounts, including email addresses, usernames and passwords have turned up for sale on the darkweb, including the private information of Australian users dating back to both sites’ inception.

In what may be one of the biggest breaches of all time, Time Inc, the parent company of Myspace, confirmed it was hacked in June 2013, and that the data has only now appeared for sale.

“Shortly before the Memorial Day weekend, we became aware that stolen Myspace user login data was being made available in an online hacker forum,” the site announced in